Professor Swinburne was educated at the University of Oxford where as an undergraduate he read for a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, which he received in 1957. He subsequently read for a B.Phil. in Philosophy, which he received in 1959 and for the Oxford Diploma in Theology, which he received in 1960. He was the Leverhulme Research Fellow in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds (1961-1963). He was Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hull (1963-1972), Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland (1969-1970), and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Keele (1972-1984). Since 1985 he has been the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992.
Professor Swinburne has written Space and Time (1968), The Concept of Miracle (1971), An Introduction to Confirmation Theory (1973), a trilogy on the philosophy of theism: The Coherence of Theism (1977), The Existence of God (1979), and Faith and Reason (1981), The Evolution of the Soul (1986), three volumes of a projected tetralogy on the philosophy of Christian doctrine: Responsibility and Atonement (1989), Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (1991), and The Christian God (1994), in addition to Is There a God? (1996). He has also edited the following books: The Justification of Induction (1974), Space, Time and Causality (1983), and Miracles (1989), and is coauthor with Sydney Shoemaker of Personal Identity (1984). In 1994 Professor Swinburne was honored by many of his distinguished colleagues with a Festschrift entitled: Reason and the Christian Religion, to which he contributed an essay, “Intellectual Autobiography.” Among his more than seventy-five scholarly articles are “The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of the Universe,” “Analytic/Synthetic,” “Thisness,” “Tensed Facts,” “The Objectivity of Morality,” “Necessary A Posteriori Truth,” “God and Time,” “The Beginning of Time and of the Universe.”